It’s amazing what you can do with a third of an acre of land.
Take Alex Silber, for example. On a piece of ground this size, he is growing 52 exotic fruit trees, shrubs, and vines, 9 exotic herbs and spices, and 4 pitaya cactus or dragon fruit species — red, pink, yellow, and white, with the yellow one being the rarest and sweetest of the lot. He is growing these mostly tropical species not only for his own enjoyment but to sell to the public as well.
You can visit him on the grounds of the Papaya Tree Nursery as long as you call in advance (818-363-3680) and arrange a time to meet before you come. The nursery is ensconced in an unpretentious neighborhood in Granada Hills and you can learn more about the plants available there at papayatreenursery.com.
Silber’s mango trees – and he sells eight varieties of them — are especially robust and he attributes this to his planting method. Silber says that gardeners may fail with mangoes because “they make a mistake on day one.” By this he means that the gardener does such an injustice to the tree on the day it is planted that it may never reach its full potential or may fail to thrive or even die not long after planting.
Silber’s mango planting technique involves raising the top of the root ball ten inches above grade. The tall mound that is created keeps roots cool and, more importantly, provides the sort of quick drainage that keeps pathogenic soil fungi at bay. He recommends the same mounding protocol at planting time where avocado and papaya trees are concerned.
As for watering, Silber irrigates his trees with Netafim mini-sprinklers attached to black polyethylene tubing. He prefers mini-sprinklers to drip emitters because mini-sprinklers provide complete coverage of the soil beneath the tree. Finally, Silber encircles the trunks of his mango trees with tree wrap – white latex paint may also be used for this purpose — in order to prevent sunburn.
There is no more drought-tolerant plant than the caper bush, which blooms six months of the year. And as I saw at Papaya Tree Nursery, its fat flower buds – the capers that we eat — are primed for picking at this very moment. Like the artichoke, the flower bud of a caper bush opens up into a highly ornamental bloom – white petals with ostentatious violet stamens tipped in gold — but if you want to harvest capers you must forego the flowers into which they are otherwise transformed. In the manner of olives, capers must be brined or cured before consumption. However, while olives may take up to six months to cure, the curing of capers – soak ½ cup capers in ½ cup apple cider vinegar, ½ cup water, and add 1 tablespoon of salt – takes only three days to a week.
And yet, if you insist on admiring the glorious flowers of your caper bush or forget to harvest the would-be capers before they bloom, you can eat the fruits or caper berries that form when the flowers fade. These berries, which are about the size of olives but have no pits may be used, after brining, in salads, sandwiches and pasta dishes. They can be stored for several years without compromising their taste.
By the way, I can testify from personal experience that the caper bush (Capparis spinosa) does not just tolerate harsh growing conditions. It thrives on them. I have seen caper bushes growing from the ruins of the Masada fortress on a mountaintop in the Judean Desert facing the Dead Sea where summer temperatures regularly reach 120 degrees. And I have seen them growing out of crevices in the Western Wall, part of the retaining wall built by Herod around the base of the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem. Capers demand nothing more than perfect drainage for their roots, so don’t compromise their health by planting them in heavy soil.
Silber grows a special selection of grafted jujube or Chinese date (Zizyphus jujuba) found nowhere else in the world. Unlike the popular Li variety whose pulp is dry when eaten fresh, Silber’s Jin variety is moist on the inside whether eaten fresh off the tree or dried for later use. The vertical growth habit of Jin is also remarkable; no tree with the possible exception of a Canary Island pine grows in such an uncompromisingly vertical manner with no canopy of which to speak. Highly drought tolerant, rows of these trees on either side of a long driveway would make unforgettable collonades.
Cherimoya is one of the most mysterious trees due to its pollination requirements. The cherimoya (Annona cherimola) produces separate male and female flowers on the same tree. (Most fruit trees have complex flowers that contain both male and female flower parts.) You only need a single tree to get fruit and some gardeners will enjoy a yield without becoming involved in the pollination process. Others, however, will only see fruit if they assist in pollination. If you have a tree that does not fruit or you wish to increase production, when the tree’s flowers open in the late afternoon, you will need to insert a soft paintbrush into a male flower, extract pollen and then insert it into a female flower. There is an excellent video at papayatreenursery.com that shows this procedure in detail.
Even if you do not pollinate your tree, just camp under a blooming cherimoya tree at dusk for a unique experience. As the flowers open, they give off a sweet fragrance characteristic of the fruit itself. Cherimoyas have a custardy taste and texture that make you wish you had a few hanging from a tree in your backyard.
Speaking of a custardy fruit, you may wish to consider planting a black sapote tree (Diospyros digyna). It’s called the chocolate pudding fruit because of the pulp’s consistency, color, and sweetness and is notable for being nutrient-dense. Its taste is at its peak just before it fully ripens and belongs to the same genus as persimmon (Diospyros kaki), whose varieties that are eaten soft have a somewhat similar texture.
There are two types of persimmons: astringent or puckering and non-astringent or non-puckering. The first category contains bitter tannins that make the fruit inedible until it softens. Silber grows Saijo, one of the varieties in this category. It is considered the sweetest of all persimmons by gourmet consumers of the fruit. Two non-astringent cultivars, Fuyu and Izu, whose texture resembles an apple when eaten, are also available at the nursery.
White sapote (Casimiroa edulis), with no botanical relationship to black sapote, is yet another tree grown by Silber, only its pulp is light-colored instead of dark. In the language of the ancient Aztecs, sapote (suh-POH-tee) was a generic term that referred to any soft, edible fruit and so we come to sapodilla (Manilkara zapota), yet another one of Silber’s offerings. Its bark is impregnated with gummy latex known as chicle, and now you know how Chiclets gum got its name. Up until the 1960s, most chewing gum had some chicle in it — until a synthetic chicle substitute, similar to rubber, was created in a chemist’s lab. Today, you can still find a few obscure brands of gum that are made from chicle.
Tip of the Week: When you think of mulberries, you probably envision a red fruit that ripens to black and resembles a blackberry. Lo and behold, Alex Silber grows two mulberry cultivars native to Pakistan that, at first glance, resemble caterpillars or catkins more than they do fruit. Pakistani red has reddish-purple fruit with a raspberry flavor. The other mulberry is King White. Its fruit grows up to four inches in length, has a honey-like sweetness, and may be eaten either fresh or dried. King White is a semi-dwarf tree that does not exceed twenty feet in height. Both mulberry cultivars are disease resistant and grow in most soil types.
Please send questions, comments, and photos to joshua@perfectplants.com
"fruit" - Google News
June 04, 2020 at 09:06PM
https://ift.tt/2XvnHoQ
These tropical fruit trees and plants are thriving at a Southern California nursery - OCRegister
"fruit" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2pWUrc9
https://ift.tt/3aVawBg
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "These tropical fruit trees and plants are thriving at a Southern California nursery - OCRegister"
Post a Comment